Terrified my son will get shot, also terrified he'll be the shooter

Adjacent to my 3-year-old son's left eye is a barely visible dark spot. You wouldn't notice it unless you were eye level with him, which means, unless you're also a 3-year-old, you wouldn't notice it. It looks like a birthmark, which is a change from five months ago, when it was a bloody gash after he lost his balance bouncing on our living room couch and fell face first into a coffee table.

He needed stitches to close it. Three, I think. I wasn't at the hospital with him — my wife went while I stayed home with our daughter — but I was told he was a trouper. Stayed still, barely sniffled and watched "Encanto" afterward. I was also told that if the gash were a quarter-inch to the right, he might have lost his eye.

I've been a dad for six years now, which means my relationship with the concept of luck has become more intimate. More tactile. I think sometimes we like to think of luck as something that we're immune to. We want to believe that if something happens to us, it's a consequence of our own decision-making. It feels good to feel that way. But parenting is a ceaseless reminder of the fallacy of control. We still try, of course. My wife and I dictate, among other things, our children's diets, their bedtimes, their media consumption, their education, their play and their relationships with people outside the family. We do this because we want them to be healthy, happy, well adjusted and safe. But none of that vigilance mattered when my son slipped off that couch. Luck is the only reason he still has both eyes today.

I keep coming back to the fallacy of control when attempting to process my feelings about the shooting in Uvalde, the school shootings preceding it and the school shootings that will proceed after it. Much of what makes this distinctly American phenomenon so disconcerting is how counterintuitive it is. When I drop my children off at school in the morning, them coming back home that afternoon is such a perfunctory expectation that I never bother to consider alternatives. If I walk in the rain, I expect to get wet. If I take my kids to school, I expect them, at the very least, to not get shot. It's not just the lack of a substantive motive that makes these shootings "senseless." It's also that a kid getting shot in a classroom makes so little sense that it breaks your brain.

I think most parents of school-age children are where I am with this, which is terrified that America's devotion to guns could get their kid killed. But I'm also terrified that America's devotion to guns could make my son a killer. And yes, this anxiety is specific to my son, to our sons. As long as guns and violence and the potential to be violent remain essential to American male-making, our sons are more at risk to be seduced by it.

A consistently perverse aftermath of these school shootings is the inevitable public examination of the traumatized parents of the shooter. Which is always ineffectual, because nothing they say can be satisfying or even clarifying. If they knew their kid was dangerous, why didn't they do more to stop him? What did you do to make him that way? And if they didn't know he was dangerous, well, why didn't they know? You raised him — how could you not have known?

Either way, we need them to be bad at parenting, because that makes sense.

Of course, her son did what he did. Look at where he came from.

Just blaming a culture or an institution is too abstract to be immediately satisfying. With a person, though, we can always tell ourselves that we're better people.

My kid would never do what that bad parent's kid did.

But how sure of that can I be? Each time I hold my son close to my face, and I see that spot next to his eye, I see a reminder of the limitations of good parenting. Which is also a reminder of the limitations of personal responsibility. As much as I can prepare him to enter and engage with the world with empathy, with perspective, with discernment and with what it means to truly be a citizen, I can't control what happens when he's out there. What he has access to. And even less control over the predictably messy impulses of a still maturing young man, who might believe that a bout of heartbreak or a bad fight with a bully is the end of the world, and might be tempted to harm himself or someone else.

My son could get killed in his classroom. My son could kill his classmates. I think most parents think we have little control of the former, and all control of the latter. But as long as guns are everywhere — always accessible, always deified, always coveted, always protected, always lusted over, always American, always cool — we have no real control of either.